Chapter 5: React
"I am Princess Azula." Rue's small voice lacked conviction as it echoed softly around the cell that night. She had spent the day sleeping, and awoken with just enough time to snag some dinner and get back before the doors closed for the evening. "I am Princess Azula," she repeated a bit more strongly, with a tense, resolute breath. "I am her. But I am also Rue An-Din.
"And no one," she finished in a low growl, her hands balled into tight fists at her sides, "can take that away from me. Not even me, understand?" Azula's voice was nowhere to be heard, but Rue felt a surge of burning, scalding laughter from deep within her bones.
"You have something to say?" she demanded. Although she had gotten some sleep, she still felt tired, and that made her irritable. Irritable was fine; it was good. It made her stronger, and kept her mind focused and her own.
'No,' Azula chuckled inside of her. 'Nothing. Although,' she apparently couldn't resist adding, 'if you really are me, and you're not going to let me be me, I'd love to know what you're going to do about this.'
To Rue's terror, her fists started to feel uncomfortably hot. Holding her hands up in front of her face, she stared in dread at the smoke curling up from her fingertips.
'You're afraid of me,' Azula accused. 'You're afraid of fire, my element, my expression of myself. As long as you're scared of burning…' She trailed off, not needing to finish. Rue knew that Azula felt that she would always be in control.
"Well," she snapped, steeling herself. "I guess I'm going to have to learn to control 'this,' aren't I?" She felt Azula's skepticism in her eyebrows, but slid her left foot back in a passable imitation of a fighting stance, and concentrated on her smoking hands. It was difficult, and she felt stupid after only a few seconds, but she kept at it, and somehow her mind seemed to resonate with the wild, passionate energy of the building fire. Before her startled eyes, the smoke erupted into roaring flames as big as her head. She thrust them away from her, rubbing her hands to try and put the fire out, but she only ended up making the golden inferno triple in size, turn brilliant white, and shoot out, scorching the metal wall of her cell. Her arms went limp in surprise, and as quickly as it had started, the fire went out.
'Control 'this,' huh?' Azula quipped, and the corner of Rue's mouth had to fight the spasm of her smile. 'Good luck with that.'
Rue gulped, pressing her palms together to keep them from shaking. She was in a locked room, with nowhere to run too or take shelter if the fire got out of control. Fear choked her for several long moments, but then she turned and kicked her bedroll—the only flammable object in the metal cell—over to one wall.
'There's nothing in here to catch fire,' she told herself sternly. 'If I aim it away from me and the bedroll, I'll be fine.' She took a deep, steadying breath, and chafed her palms together.
Sparks flew out from between her fingers at the first rub. She had fire.
-0-
Fire-bending was prohibited inside of the Boiling Rock, so Rue continued with her nocturnal habits, getting up mid-afternoon and grabbing food, staying up all night to practice, then eating breakfast and going to bed during the more watchful daylight hours. This schedule was convenient for more reasons than one; it also kept her out of sight of the other prisoners. Hopefully they would forget about her, instead of forming a lynch mob and stringing her up some afternoon.
Bending was a difficult struggle, but for some reason inside her mind she said "challenging" instead, like it was a good sort of struggle instead of a terrifying, horrible burden. Perhaps it was Azula's natural affinity for fire that was slowly muting her fear, or else she was simply growing confident and trusting herself to maintain control. Whatever it was, she was grateful for it as her heart-rate slowly stopped spiking into her throat and her cold sweats became less and less frequent.
During the first week, she focused entirely on training herself to start the fire small, keep it small, and then put it out. It took seven whole nights of practice before she felt mostly assured that it wouldn't explode out of her hands or blow up in her face. After that, she worked on making it bigger without losing control, and also on starting it without rubbing her hands together. The feeling of friction was what created the sparks, but she knew that was all in her mind. Other fire-benders didn't go around rubbing their hands before starting a blaze. She was able to do it by snapping her fingers, and then by simply sliding her thumb across the tip of her index finger, but she couldn't just make it appear by waving her hands.
'You created the inhibition yourself, you know,' Azula told her near the end of her second week of self-training. The former Firelord had remained a silent and carefully disinterested observer of the proceedings so far, but Rue could sense that she was getting frustrated by the younger girl's blunders. 'You want it to be controllable, containable,' the princess explained, drawing Rue's attention to her hands. 'You don't really want to be able to start it without a catalyst.
Now, feel this,' she instructed, pushing Rue's mind into the veins of her left hand. 'Your blood running through your veins has heat in it, and it rubs against your flesh, creating the same friction you've been making with your hands. There's fire inside me, Rue. You don't have to start a new one on the outside every time. You just have to push it outwards.' Rue's motionless palm erupted in flames, but then Azula seemed to recollect herself. She fell silent, slamming down a "wall" of sorts between her consciousness and Rue's.
This silence lasted for three nights, but on the third, she simply couldn't restrain herself. Azula was a bit like fire herself—wild and hard to control—Rue thought with a smirk, as her counterpart showed her how badly she was breathing and standing.
'Fire needs three things to burn,' the princess snapped, mentally prodding Rue's spine into better posture. 'Heat and fuel are supplied by the bender's energy, but the third thing is air, and with the way you're standing, your lungs are barely filling three quarters of the way when you inhale.'
'Bend your knees; relax your shoulders,' she instructed her the next night. 'Fire is a fluid, free element. When your body is tense and hard like it is right now, it can't flow like it's supposed too. You really should stretch before you do this, you know. Fire comes from your body. You have to take care of your body if you're going to be any good at controlling the fire it creates.'
And just like that, Azula started teaching Rue bending. Somehow the project she'd started to keep her alter-ego at bay had brought them together, but Rue found she didn't mind. It was almost as if, when Azula could release her pent-up emotions through bending, and feel some measure of control over her own body as a teacher, she was less cruel and horrible. Over the first month of her captivity, Rue progressed quickly through the basics.
Although the idea of being burned still frightened her, bending made her feel powerful; protected. When she first started her nightly training, she would dart out in the morning and evening, snatch up the first food she saw, and run back to her cell in hopes that no one would want to expend the energy to chase her. Now, she strode confidently among her fellow prisoners, waited in the line like everyone else, and walked slowly and deliberately back to her cell.
The scorn and resentment directed towards her at first hadn't gone away, but the initial shock had worn off, and most of the other inmates chose to ignore her. A few still glared at her hostilely whenever they saw her, as though they would like very much to jump on her and beat her to a pulp, but she would square her shoulders and walk past them with her face cold and impassive.
'A princess does not cower,' Azula would scold her every time she was tempted to scurry past them in fear. 'She treats her foes with dignity. Stand up straight and look them in the eyes. Remember that even if you're not "allowed" too, you could throw fire at them.'
That did help, actually; remembering her secret bending. Azula would remind her of it often—'you could do it, if you wanted too'—and it would settle her squirming insides and give her the courage to nod curtly at the most frightening of the guards, and hold her head up when she had to pass near Long Feng and his cronies. She didn't know if she'd ever have the guts to actually fight with fire-bending, but knowing that she had the power to do it kept her choking fear at bay.
After the first month, the warden became suspicious about what Rue did with her time, locked in her cell all day except for mealtimes. He posted a guard outside her door one evening, and she was forced to skip her nightly training regimen, since fire-bending wasn't allowed. With nothing else to do, she pulled out her bedroll and tried to get more sleep.
The next day, after a boring night divided between shallow naps and pacing the length of the cell, Rue decided that there was nothing for it but to start going out and about during the daylight hours. She got her breakfast as usual, face grim and determined, steps firm and sure across the metal floor, but unlike every other day, she made her way to the extreme end of one of the long tables, set her meal down and seated herself on the metal bench.
She could feel the other prisoners' eyes boring into the back of her neck, and the impulse seized her to pull her hair down from its high ponytail as a makeshift curtain. Azula's disgust at her cowardice lanced through her cheeks, warming them with shame, and she sat up as straight and proud as she could and ate her gruel with deliberate slowness, like she was daring anyone to approach her and tell her she didn't belong there.
No one did. They were surprised, but after a while they slowly started to shift back to what they had been doing before she arrived; a buzz of white noise rose back to its normal level as frozen arm-wrestling matches continued and conversations picked back up.
After breakfast, prison guards turned up with mops and brooms, and started picking out prisoners that they didn't think had cleaned in a while to do chores. Rue had not yet cleaned at all—since she was never present when they picked out the day's drudges—so a mop and bucket were thrust in her direction, and she was instructed to clean the east quarter of the mess hall.
'This low toil is unbefitting of a princess!' Azula raged in annoyance, but Rue told her to hush and grow up. She had wielded a mop more times than she could count, and was not too proud to make herself useful.
'Just think of it like being undercover,' she snapped back. 'Didn't you do stuff like this when you infiltrated Ba Sing Se?' As she pushed and pulled the mob back and forth across the metal floor, she bent her knees and widened her stance, turning the chore into a back-and-thigh-exercise.
'Mai and Ty-Lee ended up with some grunt work,' Azula admitted flippantly, 'but I was the leader; I never had to get my hands dirty.'
'Heh, what a powder-puff!' Rue snickered as she slid her feet back and forth.
'Bend your knees more,' Azula instructed, changing the subject quickly. 'Get your rear end centered for balance and don't extend so far forward with your strokes.'
'Says the girl who's never mopped before,' Rue shot back, but she lowered her stance and solidified her footing. Azula may not have known a thing about cleaning, but her martial-arts skills were fierce, and Rue knew better than to argue with a competent teacher.
So it continued for four days. Rue practiced bending briefly in the evenings—the guard at her door had been reassigned once she started leaving during the day—and then slept at night like everybody else. She was assigned cleaning all four days, to make up for never having done so before, and Azula turned each chore into a lesson, mostly to distract herself from the fact that she was doing manual labor.
It was in the evening of the fourth day that things went sour.
They ambushed her after dinner, on her way back to her cell; some of Long Feng's followers and a motley assortment of others, whose faces were dimly familiar in the more unimportant reaches of Azula's memory. They surrounded her in a blind corner behind the stairs, brandishing mop-handles and hefty fists.
"What's your game, little princess?" demanded a fellow who she thought might have worked for her. "You get yourself captured, and then… what? What does this place have that you want?"
"Huh?" was all Rue could get out before the next thug cut her off.
"Is it treasure? You hid something valuable here, and now you've come to retrieve it?" His eyes shone greedily, and that helped Rue to push past her confusion and put two and two together.
'They can't believe I just got captured like normal,' she realized with a mix of irritation and pride—the latter emotion stemming almost entirely from Azula's portion of their shared brain.
"C'mon," the first speaker growled, brandishing his makeshift weapon at her and forcing her to take a half-step back to keep her nose in the correct shape.
"Get that out of my face," Azula's voice snapped, catching Rue off-guard. Her moment of intimidation had let her alter-ego take control.
"Or what?" her attacker sneered.
Azula needed no second invitation.
Rue's defensive instincts would not allow her to bind her limbs; she could not hold herself still, and therefore she could not prevent herself from jumping on them, fists leaving arcs of trailing flames in their wake. It was a short confrontation, at least. After about thirty seconds the prison guards realized what was going on and dragged her away. But the fire-princess had done her work, and the ring of attackers was now a pile of barely-conscious, blistering, bleeding men.
"In the cooler with her!" shouted one guard, and she was hauled off with a screech of rage still tearing across her throat. They half pulled, half carried her up several flights of metal stairs until they reached the long, narrow hallway which led into the coolers—little cylindrical rooms insulated to keep all heat out, and freeze the fire, both literal and emotional, out of the bender.
They flung her into one, and her head cracked loudly against the frozen back wall, its echo drowned out by the creak and slide of the shutting door. Rue leaned against the cold metal for support, and then slid down to curl up on the floor, knees drawn up to her chest and arms folded between her legs and body. The cold was piercingly painful, but it cleared her head, like going outside into the frigid mountain air in winter, and hiking through the thigh-deep snowdrifts until she calmed down from whatever was upsetting her.
Azula did not like the cold, she realized. Her worst fits of temper had not been her own, but her counterpart's, and the uncomfortable cold had silenced her.
"You overdid it," she chided aloud.
'They deserved what they got!' Azula raged within her, but her lips were sealed; Rue was back in control. 'How dare they threaten me? They were my servants; my lowly followers! How dare they show such disloyalty?' The pain of betrayal washed through Rue, cutting and icier than her surroundings. This was something that hurt Azula more than normal—something with a painful history behind it to add lemon juice to the proverbial paper-cut.
'In another minute,' Rue thought heavily, 'you would've killed them all.'
'So?' Azula demanded, throwing herself doggedly against the cage of Rue's mind. 'They started it! It's not like anyone would miss them; they're lowlife scum! They wouldn't be here otherwise!'
'No,' Rue told her quietly. 'That still doesn't give you the right to take their lives.'
The two girls glared at each other mentally, but Azula had no choice but to back down. It wasn't like she could do anything without Rue letting her or losing control. After that, they had nothing to do but rub their skin and watch clouds of their whitened breath drift away and vanish into the frigid air.
At length, Rue found she was able to hear voices over the sound of her own teeth chattering; someone was having a conversation in the corridor outside, and they were getting nearer and nearer with each phrase.
"…down this way," was the first intelligible thing she caught, and then, "burned them pretty badly. We had too—"
"What did you expect?" Demanded a second voice harshly, and the dry tenor sounded vaguely familiar to Rue's cold-befuddled mind.
"Open it up," commanded the first voice—the warden, she realized, as the curved door slid open with a rough, grating protest of metal on metal.
The vivid red scar was not the first thing she noticed as she looked at her rescuer. Her eyes were drawn to the unblemished side of his face; the side that showed expression. He looked shaken, surprised, angry, and a little guilty, but when their eyes met, relief flashed across his cheekbones and relaxed his shoulders.
'When did I stop noticing the scar?' One of the girls wondered dazedly, but before they could figure out who had had the thought, warm, comforting darkness seeped into their mind, fogging away all other sensations.